Education Archives

It is officially August. Which means it is officially time to start thinking about going back to school. As a teacher, it is a time I both look forward to and dread. On one hand, the first few days of school can be brutal after a whole summer off. Just waking up at 5:00 AM

This post is by Elena Rossini. “For the first time in human history, most of the stories about people, life, and values are told not by parents, schools, churches, or others in the community who have something to tell, but by a group of distant conglomerates that have something to sell.” – George Gerbner, media

I’ve written before about the notion that polygamy is not inherently bad for women, although it is often construed that way by the media – including feminist media. Because polygamy flouts the deep-seated norms of monogamy in Western culture, it is stigmatized and often equated with the worst it has to offer: early and forced

Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota is one of many districts in the country that has what they call a “neutrality policy” in their anti-bullying rules when it comes to LGBT students — in other words, they ignore them. But considering the district has also experienced seven student suicides in less than two years, this policy may be much more problematic than that.

This post is by Silvia Ester Tum. My name is Silvia Ester Tum, I am 22 years old. I am Maya Kaqchikel and have lived all my life in Patzún, a municipality of the department of Chimaltenango, in Guatemala. In 2004, I applied and won an internship with the Population Council’s program “Abriendo Oportunidades,” which

When I was younger I lived and died for the Spice Girls. Iloved their sparkly outfits, their sassy personalities and I loved theirmessage: Girl Power. I remember when I was in first grade I dressed up as abrunette Baby Spice for Halloween, donning thigh-highs, a “Baby” nameplatenecklace and a t-shirt which my mother wrote “GIRL POWER” on in big blackletters. As a kid I ate it up, but once I got older I started to think aboutthe idea of Girl Power in a different way.

Our judges said the unifying elements of all three young women were their intellectual curiosity, their tenaciousness and their ambition to use science to find solutions to big problems. They examined complex problems and found both simple solutions that can be implemented by the general public—like changing your cooking habits or removing toxins from your home—as well as more complex solutions that can be addressed in labs by doctors and researchers, such as Shree’s groundbreaking discovery, which could have wider implications for cancer research.

I just ran across Karen Rustad’s “How to teach programming: shy, practical people edition.” She cared more about making practical things than about what she perceived as “coding,” so her early technical life centered on HyperCard and making webpages, rather than boring faffing about with “mathematical curiosities.” Finally she came across a project she wanted to help, and scratching that itch meant learning more programming:

According to an article in TIME this week, recent research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “women who had children early — by their mid-20s — were much less likely to continue their education beyond the required first two years of high school; they were also less likely to achieve a higher degree later in life than women who delayed childbearing until they finished their education.” The study, headed by Joel Cohen at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities, analyzed the fertility and education levels of more than 26,000 women in Norway.

Sex Quest: the name calls to mind images of a pornographic video game, which I guess may be the point. It would certainly get young people more interested than if it were called “Sexual Education Trivia Game.” (How titillating, right?) And by “it,” I mean a Facebook game created by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada to teach youth about sex in a modern, accessible way. The goal of the game, introduced last Friday, is to help Canadians learn about healthy sexuality, contraception and sexually transmitted infections.